This month's "The American Prospect" features a delightful set of articles on the idea of voting by mail. Oregon has it; Washington state soon will have it too, and California is not far behind. Many other states have absentee voting available for anyone who wants it, no reason needed.
This is exciting! It makes fraud and voter suppression much, much more difficult, if it's possible at all. No system is perfect, but this is much better than DRE's or conventional voting at polls, and costs less.
Those are the two top reasons that this idea is catching fire and is going to be irresistable:
1) The public is more and more suspicious of our current voting methods, and tests have shown that their suspicions are well-founded.
2) HAVA has added requirements and extra costs to local election boards who are looking for a cheaper way to do it.
I really do think that this is going to spread, in a grassroots way, across the nation from west to east. Our brief, calamitous experiment with DRE's will pass into history. Read this and the other articles online or in the magazine and see if you don't agree.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=11419